Cock and Bull

by Will Self

  But which one is mine, thought Bull, ranging from one display to the other, his gaze running up the female leg and then down the male. Who am I? the former cabaret editor moaned, and American tourists poised behind him in brand new Burberry wondering whether he was exclaiming at some exceptional bargain.

  At length he tore himself away and made some purchases: press-on panty-liners, Feminax and vitamins in Boots; a truss and two headbands in Lillywhites.

  But despite this decisive and seemingly mature acknowledgment of his dual nature, in the bleak mid-afternoon Bull found himself crying once more, this time outside King’s Cross Station.

  He leant up against the window of Wendy Burgers and watched the human mess circulate the station parade. Dossers and junkies formed companionable knots that broke up the streams of commuters and working folk. The spring rain still spat out of a dirty sky. Bull heaved and spluttered. He was alone in the world, he realised. Cut off, unable to confess his true nature. Oh, why had he allowed Alan to seduce him? If it hadn’t happened he could’ve gone to the Proper Authorities. Bull felt certain that he could not be entirely alone in his predicament. Somewhere in this great pluralist society there had to be a self-help group for people like him, some sort of Vaginas Anonymous.

  Bull was oblivious to the tarts, but they weren’t of him. Standing in their stretchy pink microskirts and PVC stilettoes, they felt the cold and assessed all male passersby for commercial value. Bull looked like a possible John. After all, his tears could be a premature access of remorse, guilt before the event.

  From a long way off Ramona had been watching Bull. He/She sensed that Bull was his/her kind of client. He/ she went on talking to Gail and Leroy, but his/her heart wasn’t in the conversation.

  ‘Sherri’s got some stones. Yairs I know she has, ’anna cunt owes me ’n stuff.’ Gail said this and took a suck on her Special Brew, fronds of vari-coloured hair floating in the breeze around her scuffed brow.

  ‘You’ll never get ’em out of her, girl. Pick up a punter. When you’ve earned I’ll sort you. Don’t I always see you right, girl?’ Leroy puffed himself up, as conscious of his status as a pimp as another man might be of his as an alderman. Ramona wearied of it. He/She broke from them and sauntered across the road towards Bull.

  ‘Are you lookin’, dear?’ said Ramona in his/her best bed-and-breakfast voice.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Bull looked up, his broad brow surprised.

  ‘Lookin’ fer coompany like?’ Normally Ramona would have abandoned ship on the basis of Bull’s bewildered tone. The last thing he/she needed was a fuss of any kind. But he/she persisted. There was something so pathetically vulnerable about this big man in blazer and grey flannels. And as for Bull, his grief and isolation had temporarily robbed him of what little street wisdom he possessed.

  ‘Company? I’m sorry I’m not sure I understand you.’

  ‘I’ve a little room, darling, not far off, jus’ a few steps from here. We could get acquainted.’ Giving the familiar sales pitch came more easily than Ramona had expected. He/she anticipated instant rejection from so many potential punters. They only had to look into his/her angular face with its too-strong features, and blue shadow, already by this time of the day, gathering substance underneath the slick of his/her foundation, to recoil.

  But for some reason Bull didn’t recoil. He saw Ramona for what he/she was and sensed immediately the possibility of an ally.

  ‘You say it’s not far?’

  ‘Jus’ round t’corner, love. Come on, let’s walk, it’s bitter standin’ here.’ Ramona drew the folds of her once-fashionable black velour coat-robe around her high shoulders and ostentatiously shivered.

  ‘You know…I’m not really interested in…you know…it’s just some…’

  ‘…Some coompany you’re after. I understand, love, no need t’be embarrassed like.’

  Leaving the parade in front of the station Bull and Ramona looked as companionable as an old married couple. They disappeared towards the Caledonian Road.

  Alan felt a lot better after a hot shower. He had got atrociously wet and cold during the afternoon’s learning exercises. He half suspected he might be coming down with a cold, for if there is anywhere worse for contagion than a hospital ward it has to be a gathering of GPs.

  Alan, naturally enough, had taken control of the orienteering group he had been placed in by the bland and inefficient facilitator. Leadership came easily to Alan. Indeed, if he wasn’t given the opportunity to lead he became apathetic very quickly. The other GPs sensed this and gave in rather than face his irritation.

  Today’s exercise had centred around the need to avoid bureaucratic entanglements when it came to implementing the new NHS reforms. The GPs split into groups, each of whom had an objective, to reach a given depot point where they would acquire symbolic ‘patients’. These ‘patients’ (really little loops of coloured string) then had to be transported to the right ‘hospital’ (really a copse) for treatment. Along the way there were various opportunities either to increase the group’s budget for hospital treatment, or for the patients’ waiting-list time to be increased by falling foul of bureaucratic mire (really actual mire).

  In their orange cagoules the GPs grappled with their maps and orienteering compasses. It was lucky they had Alan. At least under his leadership they managed to get all their ‘patients’ into their requisite ‘hospitals’ before dark. Other groups were less fortunate and were still wandering the Somerset countryside far into the night. Facilitators armed with high-powered torches had to be sent out to look for them. One of the older GPs even had a touch of exposure and had to miss out on the paint-gun event the following day.

  The shower may have been hot, but it was still the same depressing trickle of water Alan had come to expect of provincial bed and breakfasts. Still, he had been pleased to discover that Krishna was putting up at Mrs Critchley’s as well. All he needed to do now was make a quick call to Naomi, and then he and Krishna would be free for the evening.

  Alan ran into Krishna in the humped corridor of the establishment. The wily medic was looking burnished and venal. Earlier in the day the chilly conditions on the orienteering course had nearly turned him as blue as his namesake. But now, warm and properly dressed, Naipaul was looking forward to an evening of sordid encounters. As far as he was concerned the more sordid the better.

  The two doctors left Mrs Critchley’s B&B on East Street at ten minutes past eight. She had armed them with a Yale key looped on to a bit of gardening twine, should they find themselves carried away by the bright lights of Wincanton and wish to return after ten, when she locked up for the night. But even by half past eight they seemed to have exhausted the entertainment possibilities of the town.

  The pubs were all so segregated that, for Alan and Krishna, entering them was like being displayed a series of tableau vivantes in a museum of local history. In the White Hart there were genteel alcoholics, drinking sweet wines and gin with flat tonic; in the Unicorn there were rural headbangers—chicken sexers with their dirty girlfriends, all plump but rendered piscine by the startlingly tight fit of their stonewashed jeans. Alan and Krishna stayed long enough for a half in both these places, weathering the hostility that emanated from both groups. They then crossed the broad High Street and passed by the clock tower, around which a small knot of aspiring underage drinkers cursed on the handlebars of their mopeds.

  ‘The jeunesse dorée,’ Krishna quipped in mock-Oxford tones.

  ‘Whossat, youse darky cunt?’ came back from the middle of the knot as quick as a thrown knife. The two minority group medics hurried on, all snobbery temporarily eaten up by fear.

  In the Piebald Plover the Wincanton branch of MENSA was having its monthly meeting. Alan and Krishna poised moodily by the bar and eavesdropped on conversations of staggering autodidactic pretension. They supped moodily on Scotch.

  ‘I thought you would have some angle on Wincanton,’ said Alan at length. To his left a tiny woman in tweed was banging on abo
ut Etruscan wall painting. ‘This place is dead, dead, dead.’ Krishna snorted with laughter.

  ‘Yeah, not exactly Bangkok is it? Still, if we want a little action, a guy I know called James Poole recommended we go and see somebody he knows here…’

  ‘Well why didn’t you say so before? You could have spared us all this tedious pub-crawling.’

  ‘We-ell…’ Krishna had gone into a debauched drawl. ‘I did think you might find the scene a little bit outré.’ He shifted against the bar, one slim brown hand went to his crotch where he lightly and lovingly arranged his slim brown genitals inside their slim brown tailored housing. Alan thought at once of fucking Bull, and couldn’t prevent himself from laughing at the idea that anything Krishna Naipaul could come up with on a Thursday evening in Wincanton could be remotely outré in comparison.

  ‘Oh, I think I can stand the pace, Krishna.’ Alan turned the laughter into a dirty giggle for his benefit.

  ‘OK. If you’re up for it, then let’s go.’ He banged his whisky glass down on the bar and beckoned to the mutton-chopped landlord. ‘Excuse me, do you know of anywhere that we might get something to eat around here?’

  ‘Let me think…’ said the landlord, although he hardly looked capable of it. ‘There’s bar food at the White Hart but they stop serving at 8.30. Otherwise you might be better off driving into Yeovil.’

  ‘What about that new place?’ This came from one of the MENSA crowd, a compliance clerk who had once translated a John Le Carré novel into Esperanto.

  ‘Oh yairs.’ This jogged the landlord’s memory. ‘If you like that sort of thing, there’s a new sort of Greeky place on Bell Lane.’

  ‘That sounds fine,’ said Krishna. ‘Where do we find Bell Lane?’

  They got the directions and exited. Alan was intrigued.

  ‘If this Poole bloke knows about this place, why did you go through all that rigmarole?’

  ‘Cover, Alan, cover. We must mind our backs in a place like this.’ They tromped off down the wet provincial streets.

  The ‘Greeky place’ turned out to be the Tiresias Kebab Bar. A fat porky pole of kofta kebab twirled a greasy pirouette in the window. The place was undistinguished in the extreme. Things were pickled in big jars on the counter. Behind, and above the spluttering range, was a backlit cabinet that showed garish photographs of indigestible meals. Through a fretworked archway Alan could see a few small tables covered with gingham-patterned oilcloth. No one was eating at them. In the takeaway section of the Kebab Bar there were only two customers, grub-white girls whom Alan thought he recognised from the crowd in the Unicorn. They were slobbering on saveloys when the two doctors came in.

  Seated at the back Alan and Krishna ordered their meal from Tiresias himself. The patron was so buxom in his white singlet that Alan mentally diagnosed him as gynaecomastic. But the food was surprisingly good. Both Alan and Krishna had stuffed vine leaves and they downed two fine, lemony bottles of retsina. They declined the ‘Tiresias Special Kebab’, which, it was explained to them, was ‘a mans on the bottom, a womans on the top, and a skewer through both of them’. And for the rest of the meal they managed to avoid catching their busty host’s eye.

  Tiresias brought them tiny cups of thick Greek coffee. Krishna sat back from the table with a contented sigh. ‘Well, now we’ve eaten I suppose we ought to fuck,’ he said, sipping his coffee.

  ‘Fuck what exactly?’ Alan’s bemused gesture encompassed the plump proprietor and the two ghastly girls who still lingered. Krishna huddled forward over the little table, gathering Alan into his conspiracy. His cultivated tones fluted with dirty enthusiasm.

  ‘Poole told me that there’s more to this chap Tiresias than meets the eye. This is a front, Alan.’

  ‘A front? A front for what?’

  ‘Only one of the biggest pornography and prostitution rings in the South West.’

  ‘Golly!’ Alan was incredulous. He waited for there to be a scene as Krishna beckoned Tiresias over.

  ‘I’m a friend of “Mr Poole”.’ Krishna pronounced the name like a password.

  ‘Oh, Meester Poole,’ the Greek seemed to be playing his part as well, ‘Meester Poole is very good friend of mine. And friends of Meester Poole are friends of mine. Would youse gentlemens like some raki?’

  ‘We would love some raki.’ Krishna was now puffed up with the success of his underworld contact. ‘And we would also like some company for the night.’

  ‘Some company? Offcourse. To be alone it is a bad thing I think. We wish always to be togethers, to live lifes to the full. That is how we do things in Greece you knows. We lives lifes to the full!’ Tiresias was so emphatic and Zorba-ish about this that Alan half expected him to start dancing, his big tits bouncing in the yellow confines of the kebab bar. But instead the Greek pulled up a chair and bringing a bottle of raki from the back of the dusty bar cabinet joined them in their prurient conspiracy.

  * * *

  So it was that two hours later Alan found himself being vigorously but dispassionately fellated, in the covered dustbin area of Mrs Critchley’s B&B, by one of the chicken-sexers’ girlfriends who had been hanging around the kebab bar. Krishna, who was unmarried and seemed to have no fear of the Medical Council, had smuggled his tart up to his room, there to thrash on nylon sheets. But Alan, shaking with unnatural lust, had paid up front for this sad experience. Even the thought of the scorn he would pour on Naipaul the following morning failed to counteract the painful rasp of the flat back of his head against the pebbledash of the wall he was leaning on.

  ‘Nyum, nyum, nyum,’ gobbled the girl. And, looking down at the dark roots of her peroxided hair, Alan realised that, let alone remember her name, he couldn’t even recall what her face looked like, so completely, since she had unzipped his fly and got to work, had his mind been filled with images of Bull.

  5

  Apotheosis

  A FEW HOURS EARLIER Bull had been having a companionable cup of tea with Ramona the transexual prostitute. It wasn’t a familiar story, and Bull hadn’t heard it before: ‘Me father, he were a welder in t’shipyards. The Swan Hunter yards on Wearside. All he ever wanted me t’do was follow him into it, like.’ As he/she said this, Ramona squatted in the corner of the fusty bedsit, splashing boiling water from the electric jug into mismatched mugs. Bull couldn’t help noticing the angular muscularity of Ramona’s calves and thighs. The transexual, he reckoned, had just the right build to make a really first-class number eight rugby forward.

  Ramona handed Bull his tea and sat by him on the squishy little bed. He/she went on with the tale. ‘All I remember as a child is bein’ taken down to t’yard by me mother. They wouldn’t let us in, right. They said it were too dangerous fer kids like, so she would just point. And in the distance there would be this tiny figure, yer know, crawling like, on this huge hull, or keel or whatever. An’ we would jus’ look, an then suddenly there would be this shower of sparks, ’cos ’e were weldin’. An’ me mother would say, “Thas yer father, lad. Wun day yu’ll be welder jus’ like him”.’

  ‘And were you?’ asked Bull.

  ‘Oh aye. I went to t’ tech’ an’ got me City & Guilds. I started in t’shipyard on the very same day that they got their last ever order. It were for a dirty great oil tanker. The Anubis it were called. I worked on that wun. Did all the spotweldin’ on t’afterdeck. An’ I were up there wun day, way up in the sky, lookin’ over t’estuary, when suddenly, like, I decided I wanted t’be a woman.’

  ‘You mean it had never occurred to you before?’ Bull was incredulous. He had read many many magazine articles on the subject.

  ‘No, never. I know it’s right unusual, but thas the truth. Oop until that day I’d just been a happy-go-lucky lad, fookin’ and fightin’, not a thought for the morrer’. An jus’ like that I were visited wi’ all these, like, sensitive feelin’s. So I came t’London and pretty soon I were on t’game. You know it’s the only way types like me can get t’munny together for the shots and the op.’

&
nbsp; Ramona sighed wearily and took a great gulp of tea. Bull saw out of the corner of his eyes the ex-welder’s crinkled Adam’s apple rise and fall in his great gorge. For in truth, as is always the way, Ramona was the most unsuitable candidate for womanhood imaginable. More unsuitable than even me, Bull thought to himself. Ramona’s face was overpoweringly masculine. He/she looked not unlike Desperate Dan with the addition of a strong Roman nose. The thick blond hair that had been teased into Dallas cascades on either side of the blue jaw only served to underwrite the impression that Ramona was a chimera, or a representative of some new, third sex.

  But Ramona was friendly. And he/she hadn’t troubled Bull for either money or justification. Perhaps he/she can accept me for what I am, Bull dared to hope. ‘How far have you got with the…you know…’

  ‘The sex change?’ Ramona was unabashed. ‘Oh, t’whole way, lad. I know it don’t look it, but they say this is as far as I can go. Bit of a disaster reelly, ’nt it.’

  ‘But, you’re…I mean, I thought that…’

  ‘Aye, so did I, lad. I thought t’hormone treatment would like give me a feminine body. But all iss’ dun is like give me a feminine coating. I’ll show you if you like. No charge.’

  Ramona sprang up from the bed and began to disrobe. What he/she had said was revealed as the truth. Although he/she had breasts and a superficial coating of subcutaneous fat, which parodied the female form, underneath it, there all too clearly remained the firm musculature of the Wearside welder Ramona had been destined to become.